Upon Their Backs They Heave the Earth
By Nick Badot
It was during the year the fire was unleashed on the world that Cara joined the Society of Naturalists and visited the Titan Snails. Things had gotten dire in Madiff; crops wilted beneath the ash-blackened skies, reserves dwindled, and the townspeople dwindled with them. Stores and taverns were left vacant, and buildings collapsed from ashfall above and the flooding below; pets and livestock were slaughtered in droves but still the pangs of hunger oozed through empty streets and broken windows. Preachers spoke authoritatively of the end times, and the few refugees that made it that far west reported other places were even worse.
In short, no aid would come.
Cara had been on the verge of quitting. What use was her work in the face of societal collapse?
You can’t eat taxonomy.
The discovery of the Snails forced her to reconsider; they were proof that there was more knowledge to be gleaned, and knowledge made humanity masters of their world. It allowed them to adapt. To survive. There was still a chance as long as there was a mystery to unravel and the minds to do it.
Even when her carriage deposited her at the Mount Verity research outpost, she remained plagued by doubt. But now, as she gazed at the miles-wide rivers of lava, with the acrid scent of sulphur permeating her lungs and a team of naturalists huddled with her around the lip of the canyon, all doubt vanished.
The Titan Snails were before her.
They rode the molten rivers, and they were beautiful beyond comprehension. She had to crane her neck to see them end to end, even from this distance. They moved like slow mountains—apocalyptic and magnificent. The pale apricot of their shells gleamed against the black basalt of the fissure walls; bright, crimson veins of crystal coursed through the whorls like the gyre of an eternal cyclone. Near the base, where their ethereal bodies met flame, beachfronts of coral moved with them like vast coats of splint mail fused to their flesh.
Compared to them, the naturalists were fleas—microbes.
Cara gawped. Her grandfather had always told her not to gawp, and mostly she had obeyed him, but there was no helping it now.
“Quite a sight, aren’t they?” Dr. Anja said. She was the leader of the mission, and the only person there able to string a coherent sentence together.
“I don’t… I can’t…”
“We all had the same reaction at first.” Anja withdrew a bronze cylinder from her belt and swung it open with a practised gesture. “Here, take this spyglass. This is about as close as we can get.”
Cara took the glass carefully, not tearing her gaze away from the Snails. She placed the end of it to her right eye and aligned the scope to the nearest of the giants. Translucent flesh rippled in the viewfinder, thick, blue veins pulsed under the skin. Cara followed them until they converged in a spongy mass of lungs heaving beneath the shell. Moving the scope down, she came across long perforations near the base of its body. Gills?
Now to the head: antennae stalks swayed like enormous reeds, a long, fibrous tongue scraped against the dark walls. Was this how they got the minerals to build their shells?
“We have harvest snails in Madiff,” she said. “You can usually tell how old they are by the number of spirals in the shell.”
Anja didn’t respond for a moment. “We have counted them.”
“And?”
“Given the crystalline structure of their shells, it would be prudent to assume they take longer to form than those of normal snails. Our guesses by this measure may be an underestimate…”
“What’s the estimate?”
“The youngest, about five thousand years. The oldest… beyond counting, forty, fifty thousand at minimum.”
Fifty thousand years. Had humanity even existed that long ago? The oldest human structures were only a fraction as old. These Snails (Cara was already capitalising the word in her mind, it was impossible not to) lived for geological epochs. If they had both lungs and gills, they had likely adapted to breathe both underground and in these exposed fissures. What changes could occur in the earth on those time-scales? Could volcanic eruptions be part of their life cycle?
Cara shuddered.
“They scare me too, you know,” Anja said.
Cara nodded, eye still glued to the scope, sensing that she had more to say.
“It’s more terrifying the longer you think about it.”
“What do you mean?” Cara finally put down the spyglass and turned to face Anja.
“Why do snails have shells?”
“To protect from…” Cold horror clenched her chest.
She let the words trail off into the abyss.
When Cara was ten, a journeyman artist visited Madiff. He carried with him a menagerie—fantastic beasts painted on vellum or melded into mosaics: plump elephants on vast savannahs; cackling hyenas crammed in merchant’s cages; great dragons that blocked out the sun with their wings and devoured cities—but the one that arrested her most was the snail, towering over an armoured knight.
“Can snails really get that big?” she’d asked her grandfather.
“Why, of course they can! The ones on the farm are all babies, but if they grow to their true size, they can eat cats and dogs—” he looked at her and lowered his voice to a whisper “—and sometimes, they even eat children. That’s why you have to get them while they’re small.”
It was a lie of course, one of those harmless little fabulations that people instil in their children so they’ll help them remove the pests. Harvest snails were known to spoil crops. Cara believed it in the way that only ten-year-olds can believe.
She did not kill the snails—no, they were only babies after all. Instead, she collected them in a wooden crate behind the hayloft, bringing leaves and berries to feed them. In her fantasies, the snails would be loyal to her because she fed and nurtured them. With an army of giant snails at her disposal, she would be the most feared ten-year-old in town.
The snails never grew.
Come winter they all died, unable to escape the crate. She wept over their shrivelled bodies. Even years later, when she understood her grandfather’s deceit, the sting of guilt remained.
Weeks passed, Cara became used to the heat. The naturalists made a home of sorts on the bare plateaus around Mount Verity. Huts sprang up on the lips of canyons, where ferns and gorse once clung to the rock. Inside the structures, vents linked with metal rods piped heat out of the buildings. Volcanic springs were found in nearby gulches, some pleasant enough to bathe in, others hot enough to scald. In the latter, they boiled the yellow rock lizards that lounged on hot stones—placid, stupid things, easy to trap—probably confused about the disappearance of their prey. They were the only fauna remaining in the region save the naturalists themselves.
Their meat was tough, but edible.
Some naturalists received letters from loved ones and colleagues, delivered by haggard couriers. The recipients were invariably grim-faced when the letters were opened. They spoke of a world under the sway of darkness; starvation and want; villages abandoned or burned; cities flooded with refugees and descended to violence and chaos.
Most received nothing, Cara among them.
In the rare moments of quiet, she wondered if her grandfather was still alive.
The naturalists kept at their work, measuring the temperature around the fissures and collecting samples of the soil. The work was good—it kept Cara insulated from the state of the world outside their encampment, and it kept her mind away from Madiff. She learned much, though none of it had any immediate application. No miracle was forthcoming, no sudden insights in how civilisation could survive in a sunless world.
She tried not to think about that either.
The rhythms of the Verity outpost quickly became as familiar to her as those of the farm. She slept during the day to avoid the heat, and observed the snails at night, making notes and illustrations in her journal. No daylight pierced the sooty sky, but the glow of the golden rivers proved sufficient for her work.
She had mapped the location of the Snails (it was always ‘Snails’ with a capital S when she wrote about them, though even if she capitalised each letter she would have found it to be insufficient). There were twenty-six of them in total, arrayed around the volcano in concentric circles. Did they need to stay near the source of heat, or was their positioning more symbolic? Were they capable of symbolism? Intelligence? Each answer spawned more questions. When she drew illustrations of their sex organs, she deduced that the Snails were all hermaphrodites—she searched for eggs, but found none. Another mystery.
Dr. Anja, through some quirk of geometry that Cara did not understand, calculated that the largest Snail, nicknamed Merlin, had a shell about three miles in diameter at its widest point (the shells were not perfectly spherical, of course, so the approximation was rough).
Merlin was the first to bloom, and Cara was the first to note it.
Under the scrutiny of the spyglass, she observed that the red crystal in the ruts of their shells were not a contiguous structure, but individual clumps of hardened ruby that accumulated like stalactites and stalagmites. Near the end of her second month, the crystals turned blue and engorged, glowing glass petals sprouted from them and shed their sickly light through the heavy air. She sketched the petals.
Then it happened to another Titan, and another.
This event was named the blooming.
“What do you think it means?” she asked Anja, who had naturally taken the role of leader, despite the Society of Naturalists having no strict hierarchy.
“Another stage in their life cycle, I would guess. It seems your hypothesis was right. The eruption of Mount Verity has triggered a change.”
“Maybe they will mate soon. We might even see some eggs.”
“That would be something.”
When all the Snails finally bloomed, an impenetrable mist descended on the area without warning, rendering the spyglass useless. The only thing visible through the fog was the glow of the bloom, twenty-six spectral roses that dominated the horizon like stationary moons, like the eyes of some incomprehensible and ancient god looking out at them in judgement.
The next day, the earth started to shake. Wracking, violent gasps every few hours that dismantled the more poorly constructed huts.
“I’m thinking we should move the camp further out,” Anja said.
“Do you think we’re in danger?”
“If we are, I don’t know if we’ll be able to cover enough distance to make a difference. That’s why I’m thinking, not doing.”
Cara shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The dregs of lizard meat on her plate remained untouched, despite the protest of her stomach.
“You know,” Anja said. “I did a study on devil wasps in the Sahan desert once. Horrid things with scintillating orange wings. I saw one sting a spider once to paralyse it. I thought it was going to eat it, they do that sometimes, but it just lay there on the spider for a minute and left.”
Anja’s shoulders slumped. “I threw the spider into a terrarium. The next day, it died, and hundreds of newborn larvae were eating the thing from the inside. I felt an almost indescribable feeling of horror. A feeling that nature wasn’t just callous, it was cruel. Malicious. It was out to destroy the living. I have never felt that kind of horror since.”
The earth trembled, more intensely than before, sending slivers of lizard to the floor.
“Until now.”
When Cara was sixteen, torrential rains struck Madiff. The townspeople had never seen their like. Floods came, sandbags were deployed down the main boulevards and around the most productive fields. Murky waters rose, but the people rose too—they banded together. Not a single person drowned in the first year.
Once the floodwaters dissipated, the harvest snails returned in force. Grandfather was distraught. He rose early and returned at night with ten barrowfulls of dead snails, but the numbers continued to rise. The lines on his face deepened, and he became unusually terse when Cara served the evening meal.
Several weeks passed.
The crops suffered, and grandfather’s despair had started seeping into her. But the old man returned from the market one day with a spry bounce in his step and a wide grin on his face.
“Look at this,” he held up a squirming cloth sack. “Merchant from Sahan sold me these for a pittance. Calls ‘em gricks.”
“Gricks?”
“Watch.”
Grandfather opened the bag and a horde of green lizards burst forth into the field. They climbed up corn stalks and jumped between trees, using the leathery sails beneath their arms to glide between branches. The gricks went for the snails immediately, cracking shells in their bony jaws and gorging on the insides with slithering blue tongues.
The crops recovered, and grandfather regained his good humour.
When the cold months arrived once more, the lizards, satiated, dug holes and hibernated. Out of sight and out of mind. The rain returned come autumn, and the floods returned with them. It was worse this time around. Violent winds tore the roofs off buildings, and there weren’t enough sandbags to go around. Three people died that year, and two dozen homes were destroyed. Cara and her grandfather were fortunate to get through the season with their walls intact.
The snails did not return this time, but when spring broke through the sky, the gricks emerged from the earth, swollen in number and hungry as locusts. Without snails to feast on, butterflies and summer-beetles became their prey of choice and soon disappeared, as did the birds that fed on them. Later, even the worms started to go. The crops suffered and the lizards spread out from the farms to become the scourge of Madiff.
Grick flesh was foul, and not even the foxes and ferrets would touch them. Grandfather organised groups to hunt the lizards. Once more, he returned with wheelbarrows full of the dead, but they were never able to eradicate the gricks entirely.
This time, grandfather never regained his good humour.
A week later, the blue mist rose once more from the canyon and lingered over the camp, covering all the man-made surfaces in a thin veneer of moisture. Then the suicides started.
Dr. Lostoya was the first to go. They found her in one of the thermal springs with an iron compass lodged under her sternum. Dr. Pere was next, taking a generous dose of laudanum and then disappearing into the blue haze. More followed, at least one every other day.
The food reserves had run out and the rock lizards had vanished—either hunted to extinction or simply fleeing south. Compass, the nearest town, if it still existed, was several days away and there was little chance that anybody could make it over the harsh terrain without supplies. That didn’t stop them from trying. Dr. Anja made no attempt to prevent it when a half-dozen of the remaining naturalists ventured south through the mists.
Cara could not blame them. Aside from the impervious dread of their situation, and the terrible rumblings of the earth, which had grown more violent, there was an elusive wrongness in the mist. A sense that reality thinned amidst its swirls. Items disappeared and reappeared, and impossible silhouettes danced like mayflies in the spotlight of the great roses.
She thought these were simple delusions caused by hunger, until the voices of the dead spoke from the ether.
The voices were faint to start, whispers riding the dust that grew harder to ignore as they sharpened into focus.
Dr. Lostaya was the first to speak. Her voice reverberated through the outpost, clear and sharp as broken crystal. She wailed the same words over and over: ‘Forgive us,’ a chorus which ended only when the shake of the earth interrupted her.
“Did you hear that too?” Cara asked.
“Yes, unfortunately,” Anja said.
“I don’t know if that’s worse or better.”
“I’m not sure what bothers me more—that we’re going to die here or that we’ll never figure out what the hell happened to us.”
The voices became a regular fixture in the camp. Cara tried getting used to it, she really tried. But when her grandfather’s voice appeared, she slipped into panic.
‘I wish you wouldn’t go.’
This was what he had said before she left, their last argument. Choking back tears, she replied just as she had in Madiff, as if this conversation could end any differently.
“But I have to.”
‘What good is it gonna do to spend our last few months apart?’
“Because I can’t give up. Not until we’ve tried everything.”
‘I don’t think we’ll wheedle our way out of this one, love. Might be you need to accept that.’
Cara’s answer was nearly a whisper. “There’s still a chance. We can fix this.”
Her grandfather’s bitter laugh echoed through her hut, just as it had back then. ‘Don’t you see that by interfering we only make things worse. When you trapped those snails in a box—yes, I knew about that—when I brought those damn gricks to the farm…’
The earth shook again. Cara wept. “I’m sorry,” she repeated under her breath. “I’m sorry I ran away.”
As suddenly as the mists arrived, they vanished. The roses disappeared too.
Cara and Anja were the only two left in the encampment. Anja’s bones poked through pallid skin, her eyes were dull, and her hair was a matted mass of knots. Cara doubted she looked any better, and was silently grateful there were no mirrors in the camp. They crawled over to the lip of a canyon to catch a final glimpse of the Titans.
The Snails no longer moved. Their skin was dark, inert and opaque, dotted with craters of burst blood vessels, and their undercoat had melted away. The most drastic transformation was in the shells—their texture had a paper-like quality to it, and the whorls had flattened and shed their crystals, as if the whole shell had inflated.
“Are they dead?”
“That would be pretty fucking anticlimactic.”
The women sat in silence for some time, thinking of the great dead things below them and the great dead things behind them.
“Do you think anyone will remember us?” Anja asked at last.
Cara thought about the question for a moment. “When the voices started… I hoped maybe that’s what was happening, that the Snails were recording us somehow—some energy emitted from our minds catching in those petals... I hoped the voices were ghosts, imprints. I had this idea, a foolish idea maybe, that in a few hundred years when the air was breathable again, that the Snails would open up their shells and that we would be reborn out of them. Stupid, right?”
“I had the same thought. Right up until we made it out to this ridge.”
“Some part of me still thinks it’s true, but maybe… maybe they didn’t find anything worth keeping and gave up.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn’t think she had any moisture left in her body.
Anja gripped her hand. “Do you want to take the spyglass?”
Cara nodded and brought it to her eye. Maybe there was one final part of the mystery that would fall in place as she looked through the viewfinder. Would that give her some comfort?
She trained the glass on Merlin. The Snail looked even more lifeless through the glass. Patches of green mould spread along the length of its body—is this what killed them? A disease, a fungal parasite? She moved the scope to the shell. Faint cracks travelled throughout, radiating from the centre and bisecting the lines of the whorls.
“That’s odd… Here, check the shells.”
Anja took the spyglass from her and looked through it.
“Is that…. Oh, it’s so obvious now.”
“What do you see?”
Anja did not reply—instead she burst into wild, delirious laughter that lasted for two minutes before turning into a hacking cough. When the cough subsided Anja collapsed. Cara felt for a pulse and found nothing. She released the body and let it roll over the lip and into the canyon. “Goodbye,” she whispered.
Cara had two choices now—she could toss herself into the abyss and follow her friend, or she could try to figure out what Anja had seen that she hadn’t.
She looked once more through the spyglass and fixated on Merlin’s shell. The cracks widened. Why? A heave in the earth. Something moved inside the shell. Realisation struck her—there was something familiar in the shape, and Anja had been an entomologist, of course she would recognise it first.
Merlin’s shell—no, not a shell, a chrysalis—shattered. Great, leathery wings unfolded from within, followed by gargantuan talons, black-scaled with claws as large as the tallest towers humanity had ever built. Then, a monstrous, reptilian jaw, poking its way through the paper of its cocoon. Cara thought back to the pictures of the journeyman artist, she thought back to Anja’s story about the devil wasps. The head was out now, great ember pools stared out below the angular horns of the brow, black whales of irises swam beneath. The dragon looked at her—there was intellect in those eyes, something more ancient and more complex than any human could conceive. The spyglass fell from her hand.
The others were hatching too.
Cara gawped.
The first dragon shook free from its cocoon and stretched out its wings—their span must have been at least five miles across. It pointed its snout up to the blackened sky and a tree-shaped gout of flame erupted from its maw. The white flash imprinted itself on her retinas, and the shock wave struck her moments later, flinging her backwards and singing off her eyebrows. Cara gawped no more. Forgive us.
The dragon flapped its wings and rose triumphant over a world in which humans were no longer the masters.
This story originally appeared in Impossible Worlds in December 2024.
Nick Badot (he/him) is an Irish-Belgian writer of fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in Impossible Worlds, Factor Four, Solstitia, Andromeda Spaceways, and the Sci Phi Journal among others. He has a penchant for all things speculative, mythological, macabre and fantastical. He is currently seeking representation for a novel about endless towers and the ruins of cities in the desert. Bluesky: @nickbadot